The Surprising Joys of Homeownership

As some of you may know, after getting married last year we sold our respective properties and purchased a new home. It is a beautiful home with the latest colors and styles throughout. The kitchen is a dream come true - I finally have enough cupboard space for all those silly gadgets and tools I've accrued over the years.

But buying a brand new home comes with lots of surprises. For example, there were no curtains. Surprise! We have finally been able to put up some sort of window covering in each room - thankfully we live at the end of the street and not many people but the deer saw us coming and going. It did take us 6 months to finally get all the windows covered. (And who knew that could be so expensive!)

We thought we bought the house at a good time - prices were down and that put this house squarely in our affordability bracket. What a wonderful deal! What a beautiful house! Surprise! The radio news reader said yesterday on the news that the Seattle, Portland and Las Vegas areas are all due for another 20% drop in house prices. Wait - we put 20% down - that's a lot of money. Argh!

The last big surprise - Mice. You'd think when you buy a BRAND NEW HOME that it will be pest free. You would be wrong. Somehow mice have been moving in to our garage all winter. We didn't notice it until we smelled something awful in the garage and couldn't place it. It turns out, it was coming from my husband's car. After much time and money spent at the mechanic, we discovered that a mouse (maybe more than one) decided to eat a hole through one of the tubes in the engine compartment and start storing all of his winter food in the car. The awful smell was that food spoiling. So - out came the traps. At last count, we have caught and killed 9 mice. All I can say is - GROSS! However, I think we finally have stopped the mouse madness - it's been over a week since we caught another one. We put some steel wool along the outside of the garage door (between the rails for the door and the frame of the house). Since then, no more mice in traps. Man, I hope this chapter is over.

And I hope there are no more surprises!